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I want to open this afternoon’s talk with a story about my friend Kate Carruthers. Kate is a business strategist, currently working at Hyro, over in Surry Hills. In November, while on a business trip to Far North Queensland, Kate pulled out her American Express credit card to pay for a taxi fare. Her card was declined. Kate paid with another card and thought little of it until the next time she tried to use the card – this time to pay for something rather pricier, and more important – and found her card declined once again.

As it turned out, American Express had cut Kate’s credit line in half, but hadn’t bothered to inform her of this until perhaps a day or two before, via post. So here’s Kate, far away from home, with a crook credit card. Thank goodness she had another card with her, or it could have been quite a problem. When she contacted American Express to discuss that credit line change – on a Friday evening – she discovered that this ‘consumer’ company kept banker’s hours in its credit division. That, for Kate, was the last straw. She began to post a series of messages to Twitter:

“I can’t believe how rude Amex have been to me; cut credit limit by 50% without notice; declined my card while in QLD even though acct paid”

“since Amex just treated me like total sh*t I just posted a chq for the balance of my account & will close acct on Monday”

“Amex is hardly accepted anywhere anyhow so I hardly use it now & after their recent treatment I’m outta there”

“luckily for me I have more than enough to just pay the sucker out & never use Amex again”

“have both a gold credit card & gold charge card with amex until monday when I plan to close both after their crap behaviour”

One after another, Kate sent this stream of messages out to her Twitter followers. All of her Twitter followers. Kate’s been on Twitter for a long time – well over three years – and she’s accumulated a lot of followers. Currently, she has over 8300 followers, although at the time she had her American Express meltdown, the number was closer to 7500.

Let’s step back and examine this for a moment. Kate is, in most respects, a perfectly ordinary (though whip-smart) human being. Yet she now has this ‘cloud’ of connections, all around her, all the time, through Twitter. These 8300 people are at least vaguely aware of whatever she chooses to share in her tweets. They care enough to listen, even if they are not always listening very closely. A smaller number of individuals (perhaps a few hundred, people like me) listen more closely. Nearly all the time we’re near a computer or a mobile, we keep an eye on Kate. (Not that she needs it. She’s thoroughly grown up. But if she ever got into a spot of trouble or needed a bit of help, we’d be on it immediately.)

This kind of connectivity is unprecedented in human history. We came from villages where perhaps a hundred of us lived close enough together that there were no secrets. We moved to cities where the power of numbers gave us all a degree of anonymity, but atomized us into disconnected individuals, lacking the social support of a community. Now we come full circle. This is the realization of the ‘Global Village’ that Marshall McLuhan talked about fifty years ago. At the time McLuhan though of television as a retribalizing force. It wasn’t. But Facebook and Twitter and the mobiles each of us carry with us during all our waking hours? These are the new retribalizing forces, because they keep us continuously connected with one another, allowing us to manage connections in every-greater numbers.

Anything Kate says, no matter how mundane, is now widely known. But it’s more than that. Twitter is text, but it is also links that can point to images, or videos, or songs, or whatever you can digitize and upload to the Web. Kate need simply drop a URL into a tweet and suddenly nearly ten thousand people are aware of it. If they like it, they will send it along (‘re-tweet’ is the technical term), and it will spread out quickly, like waves on a pond.

But Twitter isn’t a one-way street. Kate is ‘following’ 7250 individuals; that is, she’s receiving tweets from them. That sounds like a nearly impossible task: how can you pay attention to what that many people have to say? It’d be like trying to listen to every conversation at Central Station (or Flinders Street Station) at peak hour. Madness. And yet, it is possible. Tools have been created that allow you to keep a pulse on the madness, to stick a toe into the raging torrent of commentary.

Why would you want to do this? It’s not something that you need to do (or even want to do) all the time, but there are particular moments – crisis times – when Twitter becomes something else altogether. After an earthquake or other great natural disaster, after some pivotal (or trivial) political event, after some stunning discovery. The 5650 people I follow are my connection to all of that. My connection is broad enough that someone, somewhere in my network is nearly always nearly the first to know something, among the first to share what they know. Which means that I too, if I am paying attention, am among the first to know.

Businesses have been built on this kind of access. An entire sector of the financial services industry, from DowJones to Bloomberg, has thrived because it provides subscribers with information before others have it – information that can be used on a trading floor. This kind of information freely comes to the very well-connected. This kind of information can be put to work to make you more successful as an individual, in your business, or in whatever hobbies you might pursue. And it’s always there. All you need do is plug into it.

When you do plug into it, once you’ve gotten over the initial confusion, and you’ve dedicated the proper time and tending to your network, so that it grows organically and enthusiastically, you will find yourself with something amazingly flexible and powerful. Case in point: in December I found myself in Canberra for a few days. Where to eat dinner in a town that shuts down at 5 pm? I asked Twitter, and forty-five minutes later I was enjoying some of the best seafood laksa I’ve had in Australia. A few days later, in the Barossa, I asked Twitter which wineries I should visit – and the top five recommendations were very good indeed. These may seem like trivial instances – though they’re the difference between a good holiday and a lackluster one – but what they demonstrate is that Twitter has allowed me to plug into all of the expertise of all of the thousands of people I am connected to. Human brainpower, multiplied by 5650 makes me smarter, faster, and much, much more effective. Why would I want to live any other way? Twitter can be inane, it can be annoying, it can be profane and confusing and chaotic, but I can’t imagine life without it, just as I can’t imagine life without the Web or without my mobile. The idea that I am continuously connected and listening to a vast number of other people – even as they listen to me – has gone from shocking to comfortable in just over three years.

Kate and I are just the leading edge. Where we have gone, all of the rest of you will soon follow. We are all building up our networks, one person at a time. A child born in 2010 will spend their lifetime building up a social network. They’ll never lose track of any individual they meet and establish a connection with. That connection will persist unless purposely destroyed. Think of the number of people you meet throughout your lives, who you establish some connection with, even if only for a few hours. That number would easily reach into the thousands for every one of us. Kate and I are not freaks, we’re simply using the bleeding edge of a technology that will be almost invisible and not really worth mentioning by 2020.

All of this means that the network is even more alluring than it was a few years ago, and will become ever more alluring with the explosive growth in social networks. We are just at the beginning of learning how to use these new social networks. First we kept track of friends and family. Then we moved on to business associates. Now we’re using them to learn, to train ourselves and train others, to explore, to explain, to help and to ask for help. They are becoming a new social fabric which will knit us together into an unfamiliar closeness. This is already creating some interesting frictions for us. We like being connected, but we also treasure the moments when we disconnect, when we can’t be reached, when our time and our thoughts are our own. We preach focus to our children, but find our time and attention increasing divided by devices that demand service: email, Web, phone calls, texts, Twitter, Facebook, all of it brand new, and all of it seemingly so important that if we ignore any of them we immediately feel the cost. I love getting away from it all. I hate the backlog of email that greets me when I return. Connecting comes with a cost. But it’s becoming increasingly impossible to imagine life without it.

II: Eyjafjallajökull

I recently read a most interesting blog post. Chase Saunders, a software architect and entrepreneur in Maine (not too far from where I was born) had a bit of a brainwave and decided to share it with the rest of the world. But you may not like it. Saunders begins with: “For me to get really mad at a company, it takes more than a lousy product or service: it’s the powerlessness I feel when customer service won’t even try to make things right. This happens to me about once a year.” Given the number of businesses we all interact with in any given year – both as consumers and as client businesses – this figure is far from unusual. There will be times when we get poor value for money, or poor service, or a poor response time, or what have you. The world is a cruel place. It’s what happens after that cruelty which is important: how does the business deal with an upset customer? If they fail the upset customer, that’s when problems can really get out of control.

In times past, an upset customer could cancel their account, taking their business elsewhere. Bad, but recoverable. These days, however, customers have more capability, precisely because of their connectivity. And this is where things start to go decidedly pear-shaped. Saunders gets to the core of his idea:

Let’s say you buy a defective part from ACME Widgets, Inc. and they refuse to refund or replace it. You’re mad, and you want the world to know about this awful widget. So you pop over to AdRevenge and you pay them a small amount. Say $3. If the company is handing out bad widgets, maybe some other people have already done this… we’ll suppose that before you got there, one guy donated $1 and another lady also donated $1. So now we have 3 people who have paid a total of $5 to warn other potential customers about this sketchy company…the 3 vengeful donations will go to the purchase of negative search engine advertising. The ads are automatically booked and purchased by the website…

And there it is. Your customers – your angry customers – have found an effective way to band together and warn every other potential customer just how badlyyou suck, and will do it every time your name gets typed into a search engine box. And they’ll do it whether or not their complaints are justified. In fact, your competitors could even game the system, stuffing it up with lots of false complaints. It will quickly become complete, ugly chaos.

You’re probably all donning your legal hats, and thinking about words like ‘libel’ and ‘defamation’. Put all of that out of your mind. The Internet is extraterritorial, it and effectively ungovernable, despite all of the neat attempts of governments from China to Iran to Australia to stuff it back into some sort of box. Ban AdRevenge somewhere, it pops up somewhere else – just as long as there’s a demand for it. Other countries – perhaps Iceland or Sweden, and certainly the United States – don’t have the same libel laws as Australia, yet their bits freely enter the nation over the Internet. There is no way to stop AdRevenge or something very much like AdRevenge from happening. No way at all. Resign yourself to this, and embrace it, because until you do you won’t be able to move on, into a new type of relationship with your customers.

Which brings us back to our beginning, and a very angry Kate Carruthers. Here she is, on a Friday night in Far North Queensland, spilling quite a bit of bile out onto Twitter. Everyone one of the 7500 people who read her tweets will bear her experience in mind the next time they decide whether they will do any business with American Express. This is damage, probably great damage to the reputation of American Express, damage that could have been avoided, or at least remediated before Kate ‘went nuclear’.

But where was American Express when all of this was going on? While Kate expressed her extreme dissatisfaction with American Express, its own marketing arm was busily cooking up a scheme to harness Twitter. It’s Open Forum Pulse website shows you tweets from small businesses around the world. Ironic, isn’t it? American Express builds a website to show us what others are saying on Twitter, all the while ignoring about what’s being said about it. So the fire rages, uncontrolled, while American Express fiddles.

There are other examples. On Twitter, one of my friends lauded the new VAustralia Premium Economy service to the skies, while VAustralia ran some silly marketing campaign that had four blokes sending three thousand tweets over two days in Los Angeles. Sure, I want to tune into that stream of dreck and drivel. That’s exactly what I’m looking for in the age of information overload: more crap.

This is it, the fundamental disconnect, the very heart of the matter. We all need to do a whole lot less talking, and a whole lot more listening. That’s true for each of us as individuals: we’re so well-connected now that by the time we do grow into a few thousand connections we’d be wiser listening than speaking, most of the time. But this is particularly true for businesses, which make their living dealing with customers. The relationship between businesses and their customers has historically been characterized by a ‘throw it over the wall’ attitude. There is no wall, anywhere. The customer is sitting right beside you, with a megaphone pointed squarely into your ear.

If we were military planners, we’d call this ‘asymmetric warfare’. Instead, we should just give it the name it rightfully deserves: 21st-century business. It’s a battlefield out there, but if you come prepared for a 20th-century conflict – massive armies and big guns – you’ll be overrun by the fleet-footed and omnipresent guerilla warfare your customers will wage against you – if you don’t listen to them. Like volcanic ash, it may not present a solid wall to prevent your progress. But it will jam up your engines, and stop you from getting off the ground.

Listening is not a job. There will be no ‘Chief Listening Officer’, charged with keeping their ear down to the ground, wondering if the natives are becoming restless, ready to sound the alarm when a situation threatens to go nuclear. There is simply too much to listen to, happening everywhere, all at once. Any single point which presumed to do the listening for an entire organization – whether an individual or a department – will simply be overwhelmed, drowning in the flow of data. Listening is not a job: it is an attitude. Every employee from the most recently hired through to the Chief Executive must learn to listen. Listen to what is being said internally (therein lies the path to true business success) and learn to listen to what others, outside the boundaries of the organization, are saying about you.

Employees already regularly check into their various social networks. Right now we think of that as ‘slacking off’, not something that we classify as work. But if we stretch the definition just a bit, and begin to recognize that the organization we work for is, itself, part of our social network, things become clearer. Someone can legitimately spend time on Facebook, looking for and responding to issues as they arise. Someone can be plugged into Twitter, giving it continuous partial attention all day long, monitoring and soothing customer relationships. And not just someone. Everyone. This is a shared responsibility. Working for the organization means being involved with and connected to the organization’s customers, past, present and future. Without that connection, problems will inevitably arise, will inevitably amplify, will inevitably result in ‘nuclear events’. Any organization (or government, or religion) can only withstand so many nuclear events before it begins to disintegrate. So this isn’t a matter of choice. This is a basic defensive posture. An insurance policy, of sorts, protecting you against those you have no choice but to do business with.

Yet this is not all about defense. Listening creates opportunity. I get some of my best ideas – such as that AdRevenge article – because I am constantly listening to others’ good ideas. Your customers might grumble, but they also praise you for a job well done. That positive relationship should be honored – and reinforced. As you reinforce the positive, you create a virtuous cycle of interactions which becomes terrifically difficult to disrupt. When that’s gone on long enough, and broadly enough, you have effectively raised up your own army – in the post-modern, guerilla sense of the word – who will go out there and fight for you and your brand when the haters and trolls and chaos-makers bear down upon you. These people are connected to you, and will connect to one another because of the passion they share around your products and your business. This is another network, an important network, an offensive network, and you need both defensive and offensive strategies to succeed on this playing field.

Just as we as individuals are growing into hyperconnectivity, so our businesses must inevitably follow. Hyperconnected individuals working with disconnected businesses is a perfect recipe for confusion and disaster. Like must meet with like before the real business of the 21st-century can begin.

III: Services With a Smile

Moving from the abstract to the concrete, let’s consider the types of products and services required in our densely hyperconnected world. First and foremost, we are growing into a pressing, almost fanatical need for continuous connectivity. Wherever we are – even in airplanes – we must be connected. The quality of that connection – its speed, reliability, and cost – are important co-factors to consider, and it is not always the cheapest connection which serves the customer best. I pay a premium for my broadband connection because I can send the CEO of my ISP a text any time my link goes down – and my trouble tickets are sorted very rapidly! Conversely, I went with a lower-cost carrier for my mobile service, and I am paying the price, with missed calls, failed data connections, and crashes on my iPhone.

As connectivity becomes more important, reliability crowds out other factors. You can offer a premium quality service at a premium price and people will adopt it, for the same reason they will pay more for a reliable car, or for electricity from a reliable supplier, or for food that they’re sure will be wholesome. Connectivity has become too vital to threaten. This means there’s room for healthy competition, as providers offer different levels of service at different price points, competing on quality, so that everyone gets the level of service they can afford. But uptime always will be paramount.

What service, exactly is on offer? Connectivity comes in at least two flavors: mobile and broadband. These are not mutually exclusive. When we’re stationary we use broadband; when we’re in motion we use mobile services. The transition between these two networks should be invisible and seamless as possible – as pioneered by Apple’s iPhone.

At home, in the office, at the café or library, in fact, in almost any structure, customers should have access to wireless broadband. This is one area where Australia noticeably trails the rest of the world. The tariff structure for Internet traffic has led Australians to be unusually conservative with their bits, because there is a specific cost incurred for each bit sent or received. While this means that ISPs should always have the funding to build out their networks to handle increases in capacity, it has also meant that users protect their networks from use in order to keep costs down. This fundamental dilemma has subjected wireless broadband in Australia to a subtle strangulation. We do not have the ubiquitous free wireless access that many other countries – in particular, the United States – have on offer, and this consequently alters our imagination of the possibilities for ubiquitous networking.

Tariffs are now low enough that customers ought to be encouraged to offer wireless networking to the broader public. There are some security concerns that need to be addressed to make this safe for all parties, but these are easily dealt with. There is no fundamental barrier to pervasive wireless broadband. It does not compete with mobile data services. Rather, as wireless broadband becomes more ubiquitous, people come to rely on continuous connectivity ever more. Mobile data demand will grow in lockstep as more wireless broadband is offered. Investment in wireless broadband is the best way to ensure that mobile data services continue to grow.

Mobile data services are best characterized principally by speed and availability. Beyond a certain point – perhaps a megabit per second – speed is not an overwhelming lure on a mobile handset. It’s nice but not necessary. At that point, it’s much more about provisioning: how will my carrier handle peak hour in Flinders Street Station (or Central Station)? Will my calls drop? Will I be able to access my cloud-based calendar so that I can grab a map and a phone number to make dinner reservations? If a customer finds themselves continually frustrated in these activities, one of two things will happen: either the mobile will go back into the pocket, more or less permanently, or the customer will change carriers. Since the customer’s family, friends and business associates will not be putting their own mobiles back into their pockets, it is unlikely that any customer will do so for any length of time, irrespective of the quality of their mobile service. If the carrier will not provision, the customers must go elsewhere.

Provisioning is expensive. But it is also the only sure way to retain your customers. A customer will put up with poor customer service if they know they have reliable service. A customer will put up with a higher monthly spend if they have a service they know they can depend upon in all circumstances. And a customer will quickly leave a carrier who can not be relied upon. I’ve learned that lesson myself. Expect it to be repeated, millions of times over, in the years to come, as carriers, regrettably and avoidably, find that their provisioning is inadequate to support their customers.

Wireless is wonderful, and we think of it as a maintenance-free technology, at least from the customer’s point of view. Yet this is rarely so. Last month I listened to a talk by Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow and Lead Anthropologist at the chipmaker. Her job is to spend time in the field – across Europe and the developing world – observing how people really use technology when it escapes into the wild. Several years ago she spent some time in Singapore, studying how pervasive wireless broadband works in the dense urban landscape of the city-state. In any of Singapore’s apartment towers – which are everywhere – nearly everyone has access to very high speed wired broadband (perhaps 50 megabits per second) – which is then connected to a wireless router to distribute the broadband throughout the apartment. But wireless is no great respecter of walls. Even in my own flat in Surry Hills I can see nine wireless networks from my laptop, including my own. In a Singapore tower block, the number is probably nearer to twenty or thirty.

Genevieve visited a family who had recently purchased a wireless printer. They were dissatisfied with it, pronouncing it ‘possessed’. What do you mean? she inquired. Well, they explained, it doesn’t print what they tell it to print. But it does print other things. Things they never asked for. The family called for a grandfather to come over and practice his arts of feng shui, hoping to rid the printer of its evil spirits. The printer, now repositioned to a more auspicious spot, still misbehaved. A few days later, a knock came on the door. Outside stood a neighbor, a sheaf of paper in his hands, saying, “I believe these are yours…?”

The neighbor had also recently purchased a wireless printer, and it seems that these two printers had automatically registered themselves on each other’s networks. Automatic configuration makes wireless networks a pleasure to use, but it also makes for botched configurations and flaky communication. Most of this is so far outside the skill set of the average consumer that these problems will never be properly remedied. The customer might make a support call, and maybe – just maybe the problem will be solved. Or, the problem will persist, and the customer will simply give up. Even with a support call, wireless networks are often so complex that the problem can’t be wholly solved.

As wireless networks grow more pervasive, Genevieve Bell recommends that providers offer a high-quality hand-holding and diagnostic service to their customers. They need to offer a ‘tune up’ service that will travel to the customer once a year to make sure everything is running well. Consumers need to be educated that wireless networks do not come for free. Like anything else, they require maintenance, and the consumer should come to expect that it will cost them something, every year, to keep it all up and running. In this, a wireless network is no different than a swimming pool or a lawn. There is a future for this kind of service: if you don’t offer it, your competitors soon will.

Finally, let me close with what the world looks like when all of these services are working perfectly. Lately, I’ve become a big fan of Foursquare, a ‘location-based social network’. Using the GPS on my iPhone, Foursquare allows me to ‘check in’ when I go to a restaurant, a store, or almost anywhere else. Once I’ve checked in, I can make a recommendation – a ‘tip’ in Foursquare lingo – or simply look through the tips provided by those who have been there before me. This list of tips is quickly growing longer, more substantial, and more useful. I can walk into a bar that I’ve never been to before and know exactly which cocktail I want to order. I know which table at the restaurant offers the quietest corner for a romantic date. I know which salesperson to talk to for a good deal on that mobile handset. And so on. I have immediate and continuous information in depth, and I put that information to work, right now, to make my life better.

The world of hyperconnectivity isn’t some hypothetical place we’ll never see. We are living in it now. The seeds of the future are planted in the present. But the shape of the future is determined by our actions today. It is possible to blunt and slow Australia’s progress into this world with bad decisions and bad services. But it is also possible to thrust the nation into global leadership if we can embrace the inevitable trend toward hyperconnectivity, and harness it. It has already transformed our lives. It will transform our businesses, our schools, and our government. You are the carriers of that change. Your actions will bring this new world into being.

Sydney looks very little different from the city of Gough Whitlam’s day. Although almost forty years have passed, we see most of the same concrete monstrosities at the Big End of town, the same terrace houses in Surry Hills and Paddington, the same mile-after-mile of brick dwellings in the outer suburbs. Sydney has grown a bit around the edges, bumping up against the natural frontiers of our national parks, but, for a time-traveler, most things would appear nearly exactly the same.

That said, the life of the city is completely different. This is not because a different generation of Australians, from all corners of the world, inhabit the city. Rather, the city has acquired a rich inner life, an interiority which, though invisible to the eye, has become entirely pervasive, and completely dominates our perceptions. We walk the streets of the city, but we swim through an invisible ether of information. Just a decade ago we might have been said to have jumped through puddles of data, hopping from one to another as a five year-old might in a summer rainstorm. But the levels have constantly risen, in a curious echo of global warming, until, today, we must swim hard to stay afloat.

The individuals in our present-day Sydney stride the streets with divided attention, one eye scanning the scene before them, and another almost invariably fiddling with a mobile phone: sending a text, returning a call, using the GPS satellites to locate an address. Where, four decades ago, we might have kept a wary eye on passers-by, today we focus our attentions into the palms of our hands, playing with our toys. The least significant of these toys are the stand-alone entertainment devices; the iPods and their ilk, which provide a continuous soundtrack for our lives, and which insulate us from the undesired interruptions of the city. These are pleasant, but unimportant.

The devices which allow us to peer into and sail the etheric sea of data which surrounds us, these are the important toys. It’s already become an accepted fact that a man leaves the house with three things in his possession: his wallet, his keys, and his mobile. I have a particular pat-down I practice as the door to my flat closes behind me, a ritual of reassurance that tells me that yes, I am truly ready for the world. This behavioral transformation was already well underway when I first visited Sydney in 1997, and learned, from my friends’ actions, that mobile phones acted as a social lubricant. Dates could be made, rescheduled, or broken on the fly, effortlessly, without the painful social costs associated with standing someone up.

This was not a unique moment; it was simply the first in an ever-increasing series of transformations of human behavior, as the social accelerator of continuous communication became a broadly-accepted feature of civilization. The transition to frictionless social intercourse was quickly followed by a series of innovations which removed much of the friction from business and government. As individuals we must work with institutions and bureaucracies, but we have more ways to reach into them – and they, into us – than ever before. Businesses, in particular, realized that they could achieve both productivity gains and cost savings by leveraging the new facilities of communication. This relationship between commerce and the consumer produced an accelerating set of feedbacks which translated the very physical world of commerce into an enormous virtual edifice, one which sought every possible advantage of virtualization, striving to reach its customers through every conceivable mechanism.

Now, as we head into the winter of 2008, we live in a world where a seemingly stable physical environment is entirely overlaid and overweighed by a virtual world of connection and communication. The physical world has, in large part, lost its significance. It’s not that we’ve turned away from the physical world, but rather, that the meaning of the physical world is now derived from our interactions within the virtual world. The conversation we have, between ourselves, and with the institutions which serve us, frame the world around us. A bank is no longer an imposing edifice with marble columns, but an EFTPOS swipe or a statement displayed in a web browser. The city is no longer streets and buildings, but flows of people and information, each invisibly connected through pervasive wireless networks.

It is already a wireless world. That battle was fought and won years ago; truly, before anyone knew the battle had been joined, it was effectively over. We are as wedded to this world as to the physical world – perhaps even more so. The frontlines of development no longer concern themselves with the deployment of wireless communications, but rather with their increasing utility.

II.

Utility has a value. How much is it worth to me to be able to tell a mate that I’m delayed in traffic and can’t make dinner on time? Is it worth a fifty-cent voice call, or a twenty-five cent text (which may go through several iterations, and, in the end, cost me more)? Clearly it is; we are willing to pay a steep price to keep our social relationships on an even keel. What about our business relationships? How much is it worth to be able to take a look at the sales brochure for a store before we enter it? How much is it worth to find it on a map, or get directions from where we are? How much is it worth to send an absolutely vital email to a business client?

These are the economics that have ruled the tariff structures of wireless communications, both here in Australia and in the rest of the world. Bandwidth, commonly thought of as a limited resource, must be paid for. Infrastructure must be paid for. Shareholders must receive a fair return on their investments. All of these points, while valid, do not tell the whole story. The tariff structure acts as a barrier to communication, a barrier which can only be crossed if the perceived value is greater than the costs incurred. In the situations outlined above, this is often the case, and is thus the basis for the wireless telelcomms industry. But there are other economics at work, and these economics dictate a revision to this monolithic ordering of business affairs.

Chris Anderson, the editor of WIRED magazine, has been writing a series of essays in preparation for the publication of his next book, Free: Why $0.00 is the Future of Business. In his first essay – published in WIRED magazine, of course – Anderson takes a look at Moore’s Law, which promises a two-fold decrease in transistor cost every eighteen months, a rule that’s proven continuously true since Intel co-founder Gordon Moore proposed it, back in 1965. Somewhere around 1973, Anderson notes, Carver Mead, the father of VLSI, realized that individual transistors were becoming so small and so cheap as to be essentially free. Yes, in aggregates of hundreds of millions, transistors cost a few tens of dollars. But at the level of single circuits, these transistors are free, and can be “wasted” to provide some additional functionality at essentially zero additional cost. When, toward the end of the 1970s, the semiconductor industry embraced Mead’s design methodology, the silicon revolution began in earnest, powered by ever-cheaper transistors that could, as far as the designer was concerned, be considered entirely expendable.

Google has followed a similar approach to profitability. Pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a distributed, networked architecture which crawls and indexes the Web, Google provides its search engine for free, in the now-substantiated belief that something made freely available can still generate a very decent profit. Google designed its own, cheap computers, its own, cheap operating system, and fit these into its own, expensive data centers, linked together with relatively inexpensive bandwidth. Yahoo! and Microsoft – and Baidu and Facebook and MySpace – have followed similar paths to profitability. Make it free, and make money.

This seems counterintuitive, but herein is the difference between the physical and virtual worlds; the virtual world, insubstantial and pervasive, has its own economies of scale, which function very differently from the physical world. In the virtual world, the more a resource is shared, the more valuable it becomes, so ubiquity is the pathway to profitability.

We do not think of bandwidth as a virtual resource, one that can simply be burned. In Australia, we think of bandwidth as being an expensive and scarce resource. This is not true, and has never been particularly true. Over the time I’ve lived in this country (four and a half years) I’ve paid the same fixed amount for my internet bandwidth, yet today I have roughly six times the bandwidth, and seven times the download cap. Bandwidth is following the same curve as the transistor, because the cost of bandwidth is directly correlated to the cost of transistors.

Last year I upgraded to a 3G mobile handset, the Nokia N95, and immediately moved from GPRS speeds to HSDPA speeds – roughly 100x faster – but I am still spending the same amount for my mobile, on a monthly basis. I know that some Australian telcos see Vodafone’s tariff policy as sheer lunacy. But I reckon that Vodafone understands the economics of bandwidth. Vodafone understands that bandwidth is becoming free; the only way they can continue to benefit from my custom is if they continuously upgrade my service – just like my ISP.

Telco tariffs are predicated on the basic idea that spectrum is a limited resource. But spectrum is not a limited resource. Allocations are limited, yes, and licensed from the regulatory authorities for many millions of dollars a year. But spectrum itself is not in any wise limited. The 2.4 Ghz band is proof positive of this. Just that tiny slice of spectrum is responsible for more revenue than any other slice of spectrum, outside of the GSM and 3G bands. Why is this? Because the 2.4 Ghz band is unregulated, engineers and designers have had to teach their varied devices to play well with one another, even in hostile environments. I can use a Bluetooth headset right next to my WiFi-enabled MacBook, and never experience any problems, because these devices use spread-spectrum and spectrum-hopping to behave politely. My N95 can use WiFi and Bluetooth networking simultaneously – yet there’s never interference.

Unlicensed spectrum is not anarchy. It is an invitation to innovate. It is an open door to the creative engines of the economy. It is the most vital part of the entire wireless world, because it is the corner of the wireless world where bandwidth already is free.

III.

And so back to the city outside the convention center walls, crowded with four million people, each eagerly engaged in their own acts of communication. Yet these moments are bounded by an awareness of the costs of this communication. These tariffs act as a fundamental brake on the productivity of the Australian economy. They fetter the means of production. And so they must go.

I do not mean that we should nationalize the telcos – we’ve already been there – but rather, that we must engage in creating a new generation of untarriffed networks. The technology is already in place. We have cheap and durable mesh routers, such as the Open-Mesh and the Meraki, which can be dropped almost anywhere, powered by sun or by mains, and can create a network that spans nearly a quarter kilometer square. We can connect these access points to our wired networks, and share some small portion of our every-increasing bandwidth wealth with the public at large, so that no matter where they are in this city – or in this nation – they can access the wireless world. And we can secure these networks to prevent fraud and abuse.

Such systems already exist. In the past eight months, Meraki has given their $50 WiFi mesh routers to any San Franciscan willing to donate some of their ever-cheaper bandwidth to a freely available municipal network. When I started tracking the network, it had barely five thousand users. Today, it has over seventy thousand – that’s about one-tenth of the city. San Francisco is a city of hills and low buildings – it’s hard to get real reach from a wireless signal. In Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth – which are all built on flats – a little signal goes a long, long way. From my flat in Surry Hills I can cover my entire neighborhood. If another of my neighbors decides to contribute, we can create a mesh which reaches further into my neighborhood, where it can link up with another volunteer, further in the neighborhood, and so on, and so on, until the entirety of my suburb is bathed in freely available wireless connectivity.

While this may sound like a noble idea, that is not the reason it is a good idea. Free wireless is a good idea because it enables an entirely new level of services, which would not, because of tariffs, make economic sense. This type of information has value – perhaps great value, to some – but no direct economic value. This is where the true strength of free wireless shows itself: it enables a broad participation in the electronic life of the city by all participants – individuals, businesses, and institutions – without the restraint of economic trade-offs.

This unlicensed participation has no form as yet, because we haven’t deployed the free wireless network beyond a few select spots in Australia’s cities. But, once the network has been deployed, some enterprising person will develop the “killer app” for this network, something so unexpected, yet so useful, that it immediately becomes apparent that the network is an incredibly valuable resource, one which will improve human connectivity, business productivity, and the delivery of services. Something that, once established, will be seen as an absolutely necessary feature in the life of the city.

Businessmen hate to deal in intangibles, or wild-eyed “science projects.” So instead, let me present you with a fait accompli: This is happening. We’re reaching a critical mass of Wifi devices in our dense urban cores. Translating these devices into nodes within city-spanning mesh networks requires only a simple software upgrade. It doesn’t require a hardware build-out. The transformation, when it comes, will happen suddenly and completely, and it will change the way we view the city.

The question then, is simple: are you going to wait for this day, or are you going to help it along? It could be slowed down, fettered by lawsuits and regulation. Or it could be accelerated into inevitability. We’re at a transition point now, between the tariffed networks we have lived with for the last decade, and the new, free networks, which are organically popping up in Australia and throughout the world. Both networks will co-exist; a free network actually increases the utility of a tariffed mobile network.

Few terms convey less meaning than “futurist.” What exactly is a futurist? What does he do? The definition, so far as I chose to apply it, is simple: a futurist looks at the present, at human behavior and human tendencies, to imagine how these trends develop. This is less science than storytelling; the development of any human endeavor is fraught with non-linear events, which yank the arrow of the progress this way and that. One can never know the future with any precision, and the farther the future recedes down the light-cone, the less distinct it becomes. We might know with high accuracy what will happen tomorrow. But five years from now, or twenty? That’s more alchemy than anthropology.

Yet, in order to play the game, futurists must make predictions. It’s what we do. So, for those few futurists who are willing to take the big risks of making short-term predictions – ranging from twelve to thirty-six months in the future – the game is particularly dangerous. Any futurist can predict what will come to pass in twenty years’ time, because no one will remember how wrong they were. But to make a prediction for the near term risks being revealed as a charlatan. Such predictions must be considered carefully, revealed hesitantly, and pronounced provisionally. Doing that will give you an out later on. Yet I have never been one to be either hesitant or provisional; I leap in where braver (and, arguably wiser) souls fear to tread. My particular brand of futurism – the “futurest” – is expansive, encompassing, and uncompromisingly revolutionary. I say this not to tout my strengths, but rather, to reveal the dangers.

In the early 1990s I predicted that VR would become the standard interface metaphor for computers by the 21st century. Did I get that right? It seems not; after all, we still use windows and mice as standard the interaction paradigm, just as we did back in 1990. Yet, if we can draw anything from the recent and somewhat surprisingly successful introduction of the Nintendo Wii, it’s that VR did arrive, is pervasive, and has become a dominant interface metaphor. Just not on the computer desktop. VR isn’t about head-mounted displays, although it might have seemed so, fifteen years ago. VR is about bringing the body into contact with the simulated world. Nintendo, with its clever, cheap, attractive and highly functional Wiimote, has done just that. They’ve done what decades of other researchers and engineers failed to do: they’ve brought us into the game. So predictions might come to pass, but rarely do they come in the form imagined. But every so often, when you step up to the plate, you connect completely, and knock one out of the park.

II

In early December 2005 I was invited to give a plenary presentation to the Australian conference on Interaction and Entertainment Design. This was one of the rare opportunities I get to talk on any subject I desired. Most of these academics wanted to talk about the latest trends in gaming and online communities; having been through that, and more, a decade ago, I decided to take the conversation in an entirely different direction, by focusing on that most common of our electronic peripherals, the mobile phone.

So common as to be nearly invisible, the mobile phone has become the focal point of our social existence. Yet, despite its constant presence, the mobile seemed poorly fit to the task of being our perpetual servant. It seemed stuck in an liminal position, between the wired world and the pervasive networked environment which is the global reality of the 21st century. The mobile was broken, and needed to be fixed. Hence, working with Angus Fraser, my graduate student – who, on his own, has had years of experience developing interfaces and applications for mobile phones – I wrote “The Telephone Repair Handbook”. I started off by challenging the audience to answer three questions:

Q: Why does a mobile phone have a keypad? We never use it.
A: Because wired phones have keypads. And so we can enter text. Badly.

Q: How many networks are our mobile phones really connected to?
A: The answer is generally at least three: GPRS/GSM, Bluetooth and IrDA.

Q: What are our phones doing all the time they’re idle?
A: Nothing. They’re just waiting for a phone call or a text message to make their day.

These basic failures in the design of the mobile phone, I argued, arose from our fundamental misunderstanding of the function of the device. Mobile phones are not simply passive terminals, waiting to be activated. They are (or rather, should be) active communications processors, managing the minutiae of our social relationships.

Once I’d set up the straw men, and knocked them down, I described a new kind of mobile phone, designed from the outset to be a communications servant, a nexus which tracked, facilitated and recorded all of the social interactions happening through it, or, via Bluetooth, proximal to it. And, because I can code, I demonstrated the very first version of Blue States, a small Java J2ME application which allowed mobile phones to note and record the presence of other Bluetooth devices in their immediate proximity. This information, I insisted, could be come the foundation of an emergent social network. The mobile, at all times with you, or nearby, knows your social life better than you do. When exposed, and analyzed, this data becomes a powerful tool. Angus and I worked up a few user scenarios to demonstrate our point: the mobile can be so much more. All it needs is the right software. I finished by encouraging this room of researchers to re-invent the mobile phone, to make it the digital social secretary, the majordomo, and grand vizier.

A month after I gave that presentation, I left my teaching position, and began coding, full-time, on Blue States, readying it for its first deployment, at ISEA San Jose. As an art project at an art festival, it might influence the creative minds of electronic artists. Perhaps they would begin to pervert their own mobile phones, transforming them into something entirely more useful.

As it turns out, I didn’t have to wait for the artists to catch up with me. For it seems that even as I was beginning my research work, more than two years ago, and formulating my theories on the future of the mobile telephone, another group of researchers set to the same task, and came to many of the same conclusions.

III

Yesterday, on a stage in San Francisco, Steve Jobs, CEO of the now-renamed Apple, Inc., introduced the iPhone, Apple’s much-rumored and long-awaited convergence device. Three things must be noted as essential to the design:

It has no keyboard.

It is connected to wireless internet, Bluetooth and GPRS/EDGE networks simultaneously, and moves between each seamlessly.

It has a sophisticated operating system, and is constantly executing several tasks at once. It is never truly idle.

The iPhone is a combination of an iPod and a mobile telephone, and these elements have been fused together with a fingertip-based user interface to make the device nearly as tactile and natural as any familiar object. It is a mobile phone, but it has – finally and rationally – lost its vestigial connections to the wired phone. It is not simply a wireless phone; it is a network terminal, with all that implies. That it has a true operating system – instead of the “toy” operating systems of earlier mobile phones, which are cranky, and which crash all too often – means that programmers can harness the capabilities of the device wholly, taking it into directions that its creators at Apple never intended. This is not simply an iPod, or a mobile phone, but a complete redefinition of the device. This, quite simply, is the future, as I predicted it, thirteen months ago.

Will the iPhone succeed? No one yet knows. The device is both new enough and different enough that significant changes in user behavior must follow in its wake. Like the Macintosh with its Graphical User Interface, this transformation might take a decade to become the dominant interaction paradigm. Or – given the level of hype and excitement seen in the media in the last twenty-four hours – it might be the right device, at the right time. It may be that Apple has told the world not only why the telephone must be reinvented, but has show it how it should be done. If they have, the iPhone will make the iPod look like a weak overture. Copies and clones will proliferate, skirting to the edge of every one of Apple’s two hundred iPhone patents. And people will begin to have very different expectations for their mobile phones.

While the iPhone both excites and dazzles me with its ingenuity, design and inventiveness, I am not completely satisfied with it. It is still a phone, an iPod, and an “internet communicator” rolled into one. It is not, in any true sense, wholly integrated. There is no way for my friends in San Francisco, with their iPhones, to know what my favorite songs are, or what I’m listening to at the moment, or what I’m reading on the web, or who I’m texting. It is halfway to the social device which I see as the inevitable end point. But the rest is just software. The hardware platform is there, ready and waiting, and will be disrupted by a dozen innovations that no one can yet predict. But I do predict they will happen, in the next twelve to thirty-six months.

The world is changing. We have wired ourselves up – and now unwired ourselves, stewing in a perpetual bath of radio waves – so that we are always connected. A billion of us keep our mobile phones constantly at hand, while 700 million of us use the Internet. This isn’t just a game of numbers, of huge populations growing ever larger; it isn’t that more is better, but rather, more is different. A billion people using mobile phones means that those phones will have an impact beyond anything that could be predicted. What we see – what we’re learning, right now – is that this age of “hyperconnectivity” has produced emergent effects. We did not know of this world until it grew up around us.

And yet, for all that, it is of us. This may be a new age, but it is still very much a human era. The bonds of hyperconnectivity have created a space for a new form of culture to flourish. We have learned that we can share what we know with each other, and that this is so far beyond what can be found in any book – or even any library – that it constitutes a new form of knowledge, something we hadn’t even suspected existed. We can take the choicest bits that each of us has come to master throughout our lives, and make of them a common cause, creating something beyond the work of any one person, or even any group of people. This global knowledge, as exemplified by Wikipedia, has changed our relationship to knowing. Consider: all we need to do for Wikipedia to work is to share what we know. Just by performing that one simple task, we can amplify our own expertise so that everyone, everywhere has access to it, and can benefit from it. Experts no longer sit perched atop the ivory towers of foreboding institutions; we can type and click and learn as much as we care to know about almost anything anyone, anywhere has ever learned.

Hyperconnectivity is amplifying our capabilities. We are no longer trapped by ignorance: we can know, and therefore we can know how to act. The acceleration of culture which began in the 20th century is kicking into hyperspeed, as the high-octane fuel of global knowledge reaches every person on the planet. It is as though each of us carries around with us the brains of all of the rest of homo sapiens; the simplest to the smartest, all of us share in this new abundance of knowing. But this is not all; in fact, this is only the beginning.

II

We can share what we know, but – perhaps more importantly – we can share what we create. Our networks have become finely-tuned systems for “hyperdistribution” – techniques which allow any person, anywhere, to reach everyone, everywhere with their vision: their thoughts, their dreams, their voice. We have each become our own television networks, radio stations, and newspaper publishers. Each of us has the same capability of reaching everyone else, a power that, just a decade ago, belonged only to the very richest and most powerful among us. And we’re putting this capability to work. Individuals are creating media – in their own homes – which millions of people read, or watch, or listen to. There are no barriers, anywhere; even in the most tyrannical states, even where the police sneak and snoop and tap, the message gets out – because anywhere the network touches us with hyperconnectivity, there we are open to the world. Try as they might, no government, no corporation, and no culture can shut that down, save by pulling the plug.

All of this means that we’ve got more demands on our attention than ever before. Where, just a decade ago, we had a handful of media to select from, we now have to choose from a nearly infinite and constantly-expanding supply of different views, produced across the street or on the other side of the world. This is the greatest challenge of the age of hyperconnectivity – how do we keep from drowning in this raging sea of possibilities? How do we know what to watch, or read, or listen to? The answer is simpler than it might seem: we listen to the voices we trust. Trust is earned, the product of experience and expectation. We trust our friends, we trust our family, and our friends and family are connected, by these same invisible bonds of hyperconnectivity, to others whom they trust, who are, in turn, connected to others they trust, and so on. The world in the era of hyperconnectivity is threaded with these bonds of trust, and these bonds have become the new networks. You find something of value, and forward it along to your family and friends, who will read it because you have recommended it. Each of us are already doing this, as we surf the web, and read our electronic mail. Each of us are already fully engaged in this emergent “hyperculture,” though we don’t think of it as anything special – it’s just what we do.

III

In this way, a new world has emerged around us: containing us, sustaining us, and turning us into something new, something unprecedented. We no longer think individually, or alone, but, in a very gentle yet wholly pervasive connectivity, we have come to share with one another matters of importance, both trivial and vital. It is not that we are of one mind – far from it – but rather that we are working collectively toward a common goal: understanding. Knowledge is not enough; rather, we are putting that knowledge to work, sharing what we’ve learned, transforming knowledge into understanding. We are becoming more effective, less fettered by our ignorance, and more authentically ourselves. With this new understanding, we can comprehend the situation that confronts us: we are at the threshold of an entirely new era, where a new form of communication – beyond any one of us, yet embracing all of us – has transformed us into hyperpeople.

The idea that the world is a database has a more distinguished provenance than just Google Earth. Back in the 1960s, R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fully proposed the Geosphere, a scale model of the world, 500m in diameter, and thus big enough that anyone could look onto it and make out their home.

The idea, Fuller thought, was to contextualize man in his environment. In doing that, he believed we would have a greater sense of the web of relationships into which we are embedded.

Even the natural world is a database of sorts, just ask a botanist or zoologist; each area has its own climate, soils, flora and fauna. All of this information is there, in some sense, but, for now, is revealed only to those with the education to keep the facts close at hand. That education could reside in the mind of an indigenous person, or in the mind of a dedicated scientist. (And lets not forget the amateurs, who often excel in one area or another.)

Here’s a basic problem: knowledge resident inside grey matter – or locked away within books, and lacking geo-context – is just too hard for us to grasp, search or absorb.

What is needed is an interface to this information; like the “cathedrals of memory” which served the ancient poets, we need an interface which can remind us of the thing itself, keeping all this information neatly at hand.

If we could walk through a landscape, and have this information presented to us, because it had been stored by geo-context (GPS and GPRS would do this, and the new generation of 3G mobile handsets provide both) we would have an immediate experience of knowledge; in other words, a moment of understanding within the environment.

That’s what Fuller wanted, and that’s what’s now possible.

II

The world of man is wholly artificial, in that everything within it is an artifact, a product of human activity. Civilization is entirely artificial. And, more often than not, when we travel, we journey from the comfortable artifice of home into an artifice created by other hands, other minds, and other cultures. Travel broadens the mind because it exposes us to other possibilities, other ways that the cultural norms could be, given different initial conditions.

What we need, as human beings, when we journey into foreign norms, are “handholds’, the points which can serve as translation between the world-as-we-know-it and the world-as-it-is-around us. That’s what a good travel guide, or good travel book does. That traveling companion is like the parent who holds your hand as you step into the deep end of the pool. The benefit of experience is that it bolsters the traveler’s self-confidence.

We can’t always afford a travel guide; we can always have a travel book, but the trouble with a travel book is that it’s often obsolete by the time it reaches publication. The world is dynamic; a book is anything but. Thus travel books progressively diverge from reality, sometimes with hilarious (or tragic) consequences. Books are also of fixed size; you can’t carry around with you a book that would tell you everything you might need to know about the United States, or California, or even San Francisco. There’s just too much there there. This means that the travel book is the equivalent of a photograph, with the same lack of dimensionality. You can possess one view of a moment in time, but there is no depth, nothing behind it.

So the Web comes along, which promises us something more, something dynamic (if not quite portable), and infinitely extensible. A website can be as deep an dense as required – just look at Wikipedia. It can reflect instantaneous changes in the outside world. It can be created collaboratively. And it can be accessed, instantaneously, from almost anywhere on Earth.

This set of characteristics sounds nearly perfect, and it is, with one big, important exception – the Web is not portable. Most people will not travel with an entire database in their laptop, updated minute by minute. Most people will not rush into an Internet café at every single opportunity to keep apprised of the latest developments in travel space or to post their own critiques. It’s too much work and too much bother, for too little gain. This means that the best efforts – such as Thorne Tree – are still essentially static entities; someone gets in front of a computer, uses the service, and keeps a snapshot of what they’ve read in their own head as they travel. It’s better than nothing, but it’s hardly good enough. Travel is about mobility; why should travel services be any different?

III.

All of this work is converging, as it inevitably must, on the mobile telephone. Already there are more mobile telephones in the world than Internet-attached computers; there are more mobile phones in use in China than there are people in the United States. And the Chinese are probably buying a quarter billion mobile telephones a year. (Many of these are used models, as people sell old handsets to buy new ones.)

The modern mobile handset has about as much computing power as a computer of the mid-1990s; that may seem insubstantial by the standards of today, but mobile handsets are evolving far more rapidly than personal computers; within a decade there won’t be much difference between them. Already the mobile handset is Internet connected, via GPRS or 3G packet-switched networks. I have a “Mega Cap” plan from Vodafone AU, which gives me about 3 1/2 hours of GPRS access per day, at a fixed price. I never even come close to using it, but I’m working on services which I hope will start to eat into that enormous data budget. In a few years it won’t seem enormous at all; it might even seem a bit stingy. But for the moment I can have a taste of the future.

Devices like the ever-connected, ultra-powerful, mobile telephone are what the traveler of the next decade will be carrying with them. Already I can run Google Earth on my mobile. Given the amount of processing it takes to run Google Earth – it chugs along on my G4 iBook – it does a fine job. If my mobile had an integral GPS or Galileo receiver, my mobile Google Earth could track my movements in real time. (This can’t be very far away; I’d be altogether surprised if someone hasn’t done that already.)

Google Earth is not just a visualization of the earth; it is, in fact, integrated into Google’s planetary database. The integration is relatively loose right now, but that will only grow with time. It is the place to place everything about place. And travel is all about place.

The 21st century traveler travels with a mobile phone; the growth of GSM/GPRS networks – even the US has them, finally – means that one handset will work everywhere (though not necessarily inexpensively). The mobile is not the preferred interface to the Internet, though this is more of an interface issue than anything else; this is why Google Earth Mobile is so very interesting. Google Earth presents an interface which is intuitive, and which provides a front-end to the nearly-infinite Google database. When people learn how to put these two together, blend the database and make it mobile, we’ll have the first “killer app” for the mobile. And it’s a traveler’s essential, as much as a phrase book, or traveler’s checks.